Cholera and Catholic Faith

 In 1851, cholera was in Greene County, Indiana. Four doctors died during a period of four days. There were none left in the county. One fourth of the people in Old Point Comfort died. The rest fled.

In the 21st century, it is difficult for us to imagine the terror that cholera and similar intestinal diseases inflicted on American, or world, communities. As the quote above illustrates, these diseases could wipe out entire towns in literal days. Since the germ theory of disease was unknown, attempting to determine the cause of cholera outbreaks was difficult: 

Among the ideas about the cause of cholera was electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. This seemed confirmed in Randolph County, Indiana, near the village of Lynn. John Lister drove a wagon along a country road and observed a lightning strike, followed by a sulfurous odor. John and his son died of cholera the next day and 27 others in a few days.

Sound and Sewage

The connection was not wrong. After all, cholera is caused by the vibrio cholera bacterium, which is found in raw sewage. The major cause of outbreaks was having drinking water sourced too close to latrines. Heavy rains would cause flooding which contaminated drinking water, and heavy rains were generally accompanied by lightning. Thus, lightning and thunder were associated with cholera outbreaks. This is why it was not unusual for communities to authorize the firing of cannons to ward off cholera. If sound and bad, damp air caused the disease, then a simulation of thunder, such as that produced by cannons, might prevent it: 

Aurora, Indiana, is a river town about 25 miles downstream from Cincinnati. In 1832, 20–30 people died from a population of a few hundred. By 1849, the population was 2,000. On June 14, there were 14 deaths despite great efforts to purify the air by fires burning at street crossings and a canon fired every 25 minutes for 4–5 hours. Fifty-one more died over the next three weeks. Sixteen hundred of the 2,000 residents fled the town. 

Sadly, it wasn't the sound or the air that caused the outbreak, it was the rain and subsequent flooding. But, whether lightning, thunder or rain caused it, everyone knew the plague came from heaven:

On August 3, 1849, Joseph G. Wilson of the Presbyterian Church in Lafayette, Indiana, said: “Twenty million free men in the person of their elected representatives defile the judgment of Heaven by a protracted Sabbath morning session, an act of impiety and audacity against which the convention of public morals (and) the editors of the secular press have lisped scarcely a whisper. Now panicked, stricken, humbled and penitent, they are assembled at the call of the chief magistrate to pray for lifting the cholera plague. It came as a Divine Volition. The natural history of cholera shows that it is in modern times the appointed scourge of the human race. At the root are avarice, superstition and intemperance....

During the 1832 episode, John Palfrey of the Brattle Square Church in Boston had delivered a less strident sermon on a similar theme - “A merciful God using cholera to straighten the world out.”

Sewage and Suffering

The idea that sin causes physical suffering is not unique to these preachers. St. Paul makes the same connection, asserting that consuming Eucharist without discerning the Real Presence is why "many among you are weak and sick, and some of you have died" (1 Cor 11:26-30). Similarly, Paul connects the sin of active homosexuality with "receiving due penalty in their flesh" (Romans 1:27).

Therein lies the problem. Christianity, by its nature, insists on an inherent link between the physical and the divine. Sins of the flesh send one to hell, conversely, God took on Flesh to save the world from sin. Both sin and salvation are incarnational. We expect to see physical connections between the two, even when those connections don't exist.

Search the Scriptures and see: the failure to separate drinking water and sewage is not a sin. Despite this, God's scourge is apparently set upon those who fail to separate the safe from the sewage. Notice, God does not visit deadly punishment on those who fail to separate the two kinds of cloth (Lev 19:19, Deut 22:11), or the ritually clean food from the ritually unclean (Acts 10:15). Instead, cholera's scourge is visited despite Scripture's silence. But it is worse than this. In the case of cholera, the failure to separate the two kinds of water is not the true cause of the scourge, rather, the poor nutrition that results from poverty is the actual cause of cholera:

DuPont, Houston: I just want to respond to the issue of cholera current in the United States. There has been a small focus of E1 Tor cholera [in oysters and seafood] along the gulf coast area since 1971, with a few cases every year. However, mind members of the Association, that cholera is really a disease of people with abnormal gastric physiology. It is very hard to produce cholera in a healthy person without absolutely paralyzing their parietal cells. I think that the reason why cholera is endemic in many parts of the world is because of undernutrition and achlorhydria and hypochlorhydria. It is a disease of the disadvantaged. It is a disease of the poorly nourished. One of the major reasons we don't see more cholera in this country is because of the state of nutrition. 

So, despite what the Scriptures say, according to the 19th century preacher, being poor actually is the primary cause of being scourged by God. Now, obviously, we know this is a false connection; God does not scourge us with cholera, nor does He scourge us because we are undernourished. But that is also the problem. What we know intellectually doesn't match what the Scriptures say. The Scriptures are quite, quite clear that plague and famine actually are scourges from God. The Book of Revelations (Rev 6:1-8) in the New Testament lists the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as conquest, war, famine and death, given power to kill by sword, famine, wild beasts and plague, while in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel (14:21) the scourges of divine judgement are sword, famine, wild beasts and plague.

Suffering and Sanctity

Is Scripture wrong? Well... yes. It is. If we take these four apocalyptic signs literally, Scripture is absolutely wrong. After all, no one would say that 21st century civilization is less plagued with sin than 1st century civilization was, yet even though we have at least seven times the population, we also have far less war, famine or death than we have ever had in the history of the world. And the same data show, again contrary to Scripture's warning against kings (1 Sam 8), the establishment of states is a big part of what has reduced the suffering and violence.

Now, some might take the recent WuFlu pandemic as an example of God wreaking His vengeance on us for our sins. If so, He has gotten a lot milder in recent centuries. We don't see a quarter of a town's population wiped out  by the Chinese plague, with the remainder fleeing in terror, even though our sins today are arguably worse than any in recorded history. And our sins are unquestionably worse. 

For example, abortion may have always existed, but we did not know until very recently how completely it corresponded to cold-blooded murder. We do now. We kill children much more efficiently and with much less risk to the mother than ever before in history. Precisely because we know so much more about how the world works, our sins are much more flagrant, much more serious. Match these facts against Scripture, which tells us God lengthens the life of the righteous and shortens the life of the wicked. Life expectancy in pre-abortion, 1960 America was 68 years. In 2022, after 50 years of murdering children, it is 79.

How do we account for the fact that world-wide suffering has dramatically decreased while world-wide responsibility for sin has dramatically increased? This is not a new problem. When anesthesia was discovered in 1831, 19th century theologians were faced with the same problem. Why would God grant a sinful world surcease from suffering? How could the use of anesthesia be moral? The debate was serious. When Lisbon was struck by earthquake, fire and tidal wave (flood) on All Saint's Day, 1755, when this triple calamity destroyed all the Catholic churches but left the brothels standing, Protestants rejoiced at the sign of divine judgement, while Catholics wept. 

It has only gotten worse. Now that we have not only a huge raft of anesthetics, but also antibiotics, advanced surgical techniques, dental procedures, cancer treatments, HVAC systems, aseptic technique and made enormous advances in wiping out many of mankind's most ancient plague foes, the problem is even more pressing. No one suffers today anywhere near as much as everyone did just two centuries previously. Given our increased knowledge, our sin is much worse, but our suffering is largely gone. Even the percentage of martyrs is dropping. 

Apparently, despite the warnings of the Scriptures, the Doctors, the saints and the visionaries, over the last two centuries, both the incidence and the severity of God's physical vengeance upon sinful man has steadily declined.  During the Middle Ages, in times of plague, the bishops would organize more communal prayer and liturgy. Now that we understand germ theory, in times of plague the bishops disband communal prayer and liturgy. Because we are Christians, because our Faith is incarnational,  because our expectation of punishment is physical, many Catholics find the 21st century episcopal response difficult to handle. Why should Don Bosco's use of vinegar reduce the punishment for sin? Apart from baptism, cleaning supplies are not part of any of the sacraments.

This is a serious question. If the Scriptures, the Doctors, the saints, the seers and the Church were all essentially wrong about the connection between plague and punishment, then what is a believing Catholic, a Catholic who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture and of the Church, meant to do? The classic response is clear: we are to consider the four horsemen in spiritual terms, not physical terms. Now that we understand the physical world so much better ("the heavens are telling the glory of God"), we are most assuredly not meant to associate physical punishment with God's punishment.

Sanctity and Salvation

So, the blind man is not blind due to his sins or those of his father (John 9), he is blind so the power of God might be shown. Spiritualize what contradicts the revelation of the physical universe, and take literally the explanation Christ gives in the Gospel. Internalize one of the great paradoxes of the Faith: salvation from sin is absolutely a physical, historical event while the actual punishment for sin is... well... the punishment is not.  

But why isn't it? If Scripture was going to warn us about mixing two different fabrics or mixing ritually clean and unclean foods, why did it not also warn us about mixing sewage with drinking water? Again, the classic answer is that the prohibitions of the Old Testament were not about physical issues, rather, these signified spiritual issues. But if Christ is the Living Water, would it have been that hard to use two kinds of water as the example? Perhaps giving actually useful physical advice would have obscured the spiritual signification of Scripture's message. 

Perhaps. But God insists on muddying the waters, literally. At Lourdes, He set up a healing spring out of literal mud. For centuries, the Church has insisted that physical healing miracles are a sign of sanctity and God's presence. True, the one healed is not the saint, but the healings are associated with specific saints. Yet, if physical healings are divine grace channeled through men and women, then what are we to make of physical scourges like cholera or murder? And what are we to make of the fact that the healings at Lourdes have steadily declined each year, with no cure at all certified between 1976 and 2006?

Jesus can say "ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven. For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" and we are comforted that the evil which afflicts us is not due to our sins. But when Jesus curses the fig tree for not providing fruit, it withers. When the apostles notice, Jesus insists faith can literally move mountains. Faith, or lack of it, can heal your friends and cast out demons. We all love the story of the blind man in John 9, but we conveniently forget the story of the invalid in John 5, who had been waiting at the pool for thirty-eight years.  Similarly, Jesus blames the destruction of the Temple on the blindness of the Jews, who did not recognize God (Luke 19:41-44) Sin is both deeply correlated to physical malady, and not correlated at all, depending on... well... hmmm... we don't actually know when it is one versus the other. 

Salvation and Statistics

We are happy to argue that astronomical science supports God's actions in Biblical history. We write endless treatises about what astronomical conjunctions may have caused the Bethlehem star or which lunar eclipse most likely happened during the Crucifixion, but we deliberately refrain from essays linking deadly microbes with divine malediction. We refrain from connecting suffering with divine action because such connections raise  serious issues. We have already seen that, if we make this connection, we must assume God preferentially scourges the poor and undernourished. Similarly, 50% of America's murders and 50% of her murderers are young black men between the ages of 15 and 30. Black Americans are more likely to be Christian than any other demographic, yet they commit more sinfully violent crimes than any other demographic. On the other hand, Asians are the least likely to be Christian, yet are also the least likely to be involved in the sin of violent crime. Are pagan Asians closer to God and sanctity than young Christian black men? You see the problem.

The Book of Job specifically denies natural disasters are a sign of God's wrath, just as Jesus specifically denies the man born blind is suffering because of personal sin or the sins of his ancestors. Jesus also denies that Galileans killed by Pilate are less virtuous, He denies that the victims of the Siloam tower collapse are more evil than others. yet Jesus also affirms that earthquake, famine and plague are visited upon us as the kingdom of God approaches. Revelation specifically links plague to punishment for sin. Scripture cannot contradict Scripture, but what are we to say? Given that Florida is always hit by hurricanes, whereas the Midwest gets only a passing tornado, are Floridians more evil than Texans, or do both merely illustrate the Kingdom is approaching? 

So we are left with the paradox: we are physically saved from physical sins that turn out not to have actual physical punishment. Our Faith depends on accepting the literal fact of salvific physical suffering, rooted in time and flesh. This physical event saves us from a series of divine punishments that must be spiritualized away from their physical roots. War, famine, plague, earthquake, fire, flood, were all once considered divine scourges against unrighteousness, all were considered God's judgment wreaked upon a sinful world. Today, the Catholic Church does not even hint at this connection. 

Scripture describes both salvation and punishment as having deep roots in the physical world, but modern man now only accepts this physicality for salvation, not for punishment.  We insist all the good things are from God, but despite constant Scriptural admonitions which describe how God visits physical vengeance on the wicked and how He scourges those He loves (Heb 12:6), we cannot afford to insist painful things are likewise from God, for we cannot explain why neither the wicked nor the beloved are being scourged today as they once were.